The President's Con Man

What actually happened

Grant & Ward paid fabulous 'returns' that were simply new investors' deposits; Ward kept the books, and the Grants kept recruiting. The 1884 collapse took a brokerage, a bank, and the family's entire wealth: Grant reportedly had less than $200 in cash. 'I have made it the rule of my life to trust a man long after other people gave him up,' Grant wrote, 'but I don't see how I can ever trust another human being again.'

Dying of throat cancer, Grant wrote his Personal Memoirs in a race he could see the end of, finishing days before his death in July 1885. Mark Twain published them; the book earned Julia Grant roughly $450,000 and became an American classic. Ward served six and a half years and died obscure.

The exact interval between manuscript and death varies slightly by biography and is flagged in the episode.

The longer arc

Ward was a minister's son from Geneseo, New York, and had a history of exploiting trust before Grant ever met him: he was said to have skimmed funds as a young bank clerk years before founding Grant & Ward with the ex-president's son, Buck. Wall Street's nickname for him, the Young Napoleon of finance, described a con man's charm rather than any real financial gift; he never made a legitimate profitable trade the whole time the firm operated.

Ward served six and a half years of a ten-year sentence at Sing Sing, released in 1892, and afterward tried and failed to rebuild a fortune, including an aborted attempt to kidnap his own estranged son. He died in 1925, largely forgotten, at 74. Grant, by contrast, became a posthumous financial success: dying eight days after finishing his memoirs in July 1885, he left Julia Grant a book that Mark Twain's publishing house sold in the hundreds of thousands of copies, earning the family roughly $450,000, several times what the Grant & Ward collapse had cost them.